"Something in the Air" by Richard Dresser, directed by Mara B. Sabinson opened last Friday, the first of two drama department-sponsored production for this summer.
According to the director's notes, "finding this script was a delightful surprise."
The delights of this real gem are no surprise at all, for it manages to delve into potent issues about the innate evil in the human nature, whilst sparing its biting critique of contemporary American social mores, excessive cynicism and philosophizing.
Set in a large anonymous American city, the dark comedy even manages a non-judgmental lightness of tone and a happy ending despite its serious theme of covetousness, avarice and pure vice that leads eventually to murder.
The issues that the play grapples with hit home because the characters' cold superficiality and their mechanical wit, which they unceasingly deploy to deflect moral culpability, finds articulation within the comedy and rings through real.
Walker (Jeffrey Withers '02) attempts to murder Cram, an bed-ridden friend, for insurance money. Enter his assassin, a saccharine-sweet nurse, Holloway (the vivacious Heather Spiegel '02), persuaded by his grovelling antics from her self-sacrificial innocence to being an agent of death.
Despite the pessimistic assumption of intrinsic human evil, the play is performed in an incredibly light-hearted tone. This lightness of tone is also in the unexpected blossoming of romantic love, both between Walker and Sloane (Brenda Withers '00) -- a rather difficult dramatic relationship for the real-life siblings -- and between the vocally-booming Cram (Justin Jack '03) and Holloway.
In general, the acting of the entire cast is well-polished and technically competent, especially the worldly sadness and disenchanted vulnerability of Sloane who finds in Brenda Withers '00 a film noir sultriness, a la Marlene Dietrich.
One such emotionally-rending example is when Sloane rejects Neville's romantic advances, defending her preference for "constant, low-level depression."
However, the satirical darkness within the gritty emotional landscape is at times vaguely conveyed, and the profound loneliness that typifies the urbane characters is slightly lacking, a task difficult to accomplish given the overly youthful innocence of the cast.
Despite this, the script is taut with perspicacious observations of a post-modern capitalist self-centeredness, of which Neville (Michael "Niegel" Smith '02) is the ultimate incarnation. Dresser, however, does not fail to recognize the ultimate redemption through human love, even though this is also skeptically questioned, especially the love between Holloway and Cram.
The sets and lighting, lavishly designed and gorgeously set up, give no hint at all of a college production. No expenses were spared in the postmodern turn-of-the-millennium set, complete with the city chic of industrial plexi-glass furniture, amongst which the most striking are the completely transparent table and chairs, as cute as iMacs, tailor-made in Boston and Concord, N.H.
The constant striking stage tableau of this hauntingly beautiful but transparent and morally fragile modernity serves as a quiet but strong visual metaphor for the superficiality of post-Y2K America.
The consumerist candy-pop appeal suggested through prop elements, such as the cutesy fish tank confronting the audience onstage, juxtaposed with the superficial materialistic satisfaction and profound spiritual void of an increasingly corrupted society where human hearts are hardened by the love of money and left too cold by capitalist values of self-love, fear and greed to love each other.
The candy-pop black humor also betrays a concurrently paradoxical desire, an almost vengeful desire to seek out the loss of spontaneous cheeriness and silly happiness robbed straight from the heart.
The darkness of our times is most visually conveyed at the end when at the pinnacle of the characters' material success, the plat du jour of their fine-dining is, in fact, wriggling rodents that need a last thump before being consumed.
